Kawaguchi Turns to Brocade for Citywide Municipal Ethernet Fabric

Kawaguchi City, a municipality within the Greater Tokyo Area, is set to become the first local government administration worldwide to operate a single Ethernet fabric spanning all city offices. The new municipal network, which is being built around innovative Ethernet fabrics based on Brocade® VDX® switches, will help Kawaguchi City increase the flexibility and agility of its information systems in order to address new challenges, including the rollout of Japan's "My Number" national identification system, which started in October 2015.

Kawaguchi City has a long track record of pioneering new IT developments in Japan, being among the first local governments to adopt open systems, SAN/LAN convergence, and server and network virtualization. With its existing IP network infrastructure approaching end of life, and with redevelopment of the city hall scheduled to start in 2016, the City conducted an open tender for a next-generation network with a fabric architecture and support for software-defined networking protocols.

"We face a number of near term and longer term challenges -- such as avoiding operational disruption while our city hall is being rebuilt and ensuring we can address demands that the My Number program will bring about -- which make increased network flexibility and agility a must," said Mizuho Ooyama, Director of Information Policy Division, Kawaguchi City. "The proposal to deploy Brocade VDX switches to create a single Ethernet fabric spanning all city offices, which gave us a great deal of flexibility in the location of our information systems, was also the strongest in terms of technology, costs, and feasibility. We are now moving ahead to fully realize our vision of a far more agile municipal network."

By the end of the year, Brocade partner Net One Systems will install a pair of Brocade VDX 6740 switches in 22 Kawaguchi City locations, with a mesh of 40 Gbps Ethernet interconnections over the city's own optical fiber cable infrastructure, combined with Brocade VCS® Fabric technology to form a logical chassis that can be managed as a single switch. This will provide the City with a highly resilient municipal network, featuring low-latency connections between 10 Gbps Ethernet access ports across fabric, that will form a robust and highly automated foundation for virtualized network operations.

"The Kawaguchi City municipal fabric project represents a very compelling vision of the New IP as an advanced but evolutionary network architecture," said Masakazu Aoba, Representative Director, Brocade Japan. "The new fabric switching solution we are providing to the City will enable it to safely migrate existing systems from its legacy network and easily extend its services to meet new demands."

In preparation for next year's city hall redevelopment, the Kawaguchi City administration plans to use its new fabric network to mirror data and relocate information systems to other municipal offices, leveraging the automated intelligence of Brocade VCS Fabric technology to ensure the migration is invisible to end users. Over time, the City plans to expand its use of network virtualization to create multiple logical fabrics to support different services with different network requirements, such as a new virtual desktop system. It also envisions configuring its fabric to connect with external cloud data centers to form a seamless federated cloud for service delivery.

About Net One Systems

Net One Systems Co., Ltd. optimizes customers' information infrastructures to help the customers leverage strategic information with a vision to contribute to the customers' end-users. In order to make it happen, Net One Systems always watches the world's trend of cutting-edge technologies to verify and deliver best-of-breed technologies, as well as sharing the company's expertise with the customers by implementing various technologies internally. For more details, please visit www.netone.co.jp.

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